The Allahakbarries Cricket Team: How a Group of Victorian Authors invented Celebrity Cricket
In the late 1800s, JM Barrie, a cricket fanatic, wanted to make his own cricket team. Barrie was the author of the classic novel for children; Peter Pan and he managed to use his celebrity status at the time to recruit a bunch of writers and other famous
personalities and set up a cricket team. The team was called the Allahakbarries and even though it did not win too many matches in its existence, it did leave behind a legacy; the birth of the celebrity sports match. This fascinating team filled with literary
geniuses of the time has become legendary and it managed to write itself into the pages of the history books.
Besides being a famous author, Barrie was also a huge cricket fan. He loved to watch the game and enjoyed playing it as well. The only problem for him was that he was the most un-athletic person in modern history; he was 5 foot 3 inches tall, liked to smoke
a lot and drink even more and was more comfortable sitting in an armchair talking to his gentlemen colleagues tan playing any sport.
This did not stop him from pursuing his dream of having his own cricket team though. In 1887, he rounded up some of the best writers of the time and set up his own sports team. Barrie managed to rope in Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame, A.A. Milne
who created Winnie-the-Pooh, Jerome K. Jerome and P.G. Woodhouse as well.
The team they formed was called the Allahakbarries. It was called that after a friend of Barrie’s said that Allah Akbar meant ‘Heaven help us’ but it actually means ‘God is Great’, but the name stuck and was used by the team ever since. The other interesting
part of the team’s name was that it had the word Barrie in its name and that made it even more relevant to the players.
A lot of the players were hopeless cricketers, most of them did not have a lot of experience at playing the game at the professional level and they were not even proper athletes. They were out of shape and preferred a good drink over a game of cricket any
day.
The exception to this rule was Conan Doyle who had played some first class cricket and was an all round sportsman. He was a pretty decent bowler and once famously got WG Grace bowled out with a superb delivery. He had also played football for Portsmouth
FC and had even brought downhill skiing to Switzerland. What the members of the team lacked in skill they made up for in enthusiasm and having Conon Doyle on the team changed their fortunes. Before the start of the first match, Barrie found that one of the
players did not even know which side of the bat to hit the ball with.
The team had some success but it was mostly an exhibition team that was made up of celebrities at the time. World War I rolled around and ended the team’s ambitions of playing further. A few of the players were sent to the frontlines and two of them were
killed. These happened to be two of the four Llewelyn Davies brothers who were Barrie’s inspiration for the Lost Boys in the Peter Pan story and greatly loved by him. Barrie was devastated at the loss and out of respect for their fallen teammates, the Allahakbarries
disbanded in 1913, never to play again. That is until 2010, when the team was resurrected for an exhibition match to honour Barrie’s 150th birth anniversary.
Even though the Allahakbarries did not achieve much success on the cricket pitch, the team left behind a legacy that remains till this day. The members of this unusual cricket team started the trend of celebrity sports matches all over the world. Today,
movie stars, musicians and other celebrities routinely take part in cricket and football matches usually for charity.
Whatever one thinks about this now famous team, we have to admit that the Allahakbarries was probably the most famous and the most intelligent team to ever play the game of cricket in the sport’s long history.
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